Ten years ago, to the day. March 24, 2001, the first official released version of Mac OS X went on sale, for USD 129. It was a massive step up and a massive step down from MacOS 9 at the same time - technically way more advanced, but clearly still in its infancy and pretty much unusable. Kernel panics, crashes, incredibly slow, and lacking many key features. It was so bad, in fact, that Mac OS X 10.1 was released as a free upgrade. Of course, we geeks know that Mac OS X is technically a lot older, but alas, let's just celebrate these 10 years. Maybe Lion will finally bring a usable non-crashing Finder!

I also can't remember the last time Finder failed on me. I'm sure it does for people. All I know is that Explorer, on XP, Vista, and 7 fails (your words, just using them) on me a lot more than Finder does for me and I use the Finder and Explorer quite a bit.

I don't run either with a bunch of plugs to change the way it works or feels. I see no reason for that. My desktop on all OSs is covered up a vast majority of time while I'm working on a bunch of different things.

I'm guessing it is plugs or something that is causing your crashes. Just like Harley riders that mod their rides a lot have a lot more problems with their bikes shaking apart. I don't mod OS X or Windows. (shrugs)